EDUCATION ON SENIOR CITIZENS; NEW UNDERSTANDING AND APPROACHES TO INCREASE QUALITY OF LIFE

The citizens’ quality of life (QoL) is an issue that public bodies, NGOs and associations try to increase, and also society and individuals try to reach. QoL is a very complex personal status, with objective and subjective components. To understand and increase the senior learners' QoL it is necessary to consider the cultural context of the individual, but also the basic needs and life requirements. All that constitute the initial requisites for a minimum level of QoL. When basic needs are covered, then QoL becomes more a subjective factor.

Institutions that try to increase citizens QoL act in different levels: health, security, transport, support, integration, etc. It is common to find researches about QoL that focus on disabled, ill, or specific groups in risk or context. When the target group is wider and there is not a clear requirement for the needs to be covered, then it is difficult to propose actions to increase the QoL, but it does not mean that it is not possible to maintain and improve QoL.

Focusing on senior citizens (adults over 65 years old or retired) without any specific disability or illness and also with basic needs are covered, QoL can be maintained and improved thanks to education.

Adult education institutions provide training and educational activities to senior citizens. Institutions provide specific courses and pedagogies designed to seniors while seniors’ motivation is completely personal. In this life stage lifelong learning has a more wide aims: well-being, integration, social participation, activity, etc. All this can be summarised in the whole concept of QoL.

It is agreed among the professionals and researchers that education has a lot of potentialities, when educational activities are designed properly, those can be used to learners acquire knowledge, skills, and competences that can be useful for communicate, share, or for work. Even that obvious fact, it is not possible to find researches on educational activities focused to increase senior learners' QoL it is more common to find researches on the area of health, geriatric, psychology, etc, that propose a lot of different activities to increase QoL (ambient assisted living, medicaments, technology, etc).

The use of education to increase well-being, integration, participation, perceived control, physical and pshchological health, etc. is widely used by adult education institution, but strangely, there has not yet build a formal framework about how it can be promoted, evaluated and implemented. The European Project QEduSen (Evaluation toolkit on seniors education to improve their quality of life) started based on previous need.

This article shows the state of the art about researches done on QoL and how those can be related to education, extract main topics and issues that are considered later on the QEduSen project, that is: senior needs, education potentialities, institutional intervention, how to evaluate, how to improve institution’s quality.

There is not any guide or evaluation toolkit to assess the quality of an educational institution that tries to improve the senior learners' QoL. The QEduSen project tries to solve this need. This is a very innovative project with a product that should be targeted carefully. We show in this paper, that this innovation is necessary, it is possible, and we show how it is reached in the QEduSen.